SLIDESHOW: Startups playing in the world's hottest industries

Best bets for startups in 2013

Have a digital forensic startup, or an awesome new social network game? You might be best positioned to take advantage of booming young industries, projected to stay hot for startups in years to come. The market research firm IBISWorld Inc. released its 8 Hot Industries for Startups this month. Here's our take on the companies already in the game and ready to win it.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Social network game development

The Finnish
developers behind the Angry Birds franchise continue to build social and mobile
games that attract millions of players around the world, including Angry
Birds Star Wars, released
on Facebook last December. And then there's Zynga, which has
struggled financially since its IPO, but still has more than a dozen social
network games in this still young gaming industry.

Growth won't be
slowing down any time soon. Revenue for social game developers is projected to
grow 31.9 percent to $6 billion this year. Over the past five years, the
industry has grown nearly 185 percent annually.

Rovio

Online shoe sales

We're all familiar with the pioneer of online shoe sales, Zappos,
which continues to innovate with more selection and better service. But
now there's ShoeDazzle, offering a new monthly
subscription toward the purchase of new shoes as well as exclusive
celebrity designs, Sole Society, the direct-to-consumer
designer shoe e-commerce startup, and JustFab, with all of its brand
shoes (with offerings personalized to the shopper) at $39.95.

They've helped the online shoe sales industry grow an
average of 16.2 percent each of the last five years to $8.9 billion. As more
bricks-and-mortar retailers get their shoe collections online, the industry
will undoubtedly grow even more.

Sole Society

TV and home theater installation services

As more of the
world upgrades to larger and higher-tech televisions, there comes a need for
more sophisticated installation. Receiving accolades for its service to
residences is iYogi, an Indian
company that provides residential tech support, home networking and theater
installation. It's in the process of hiring
1000 techies in the United States to grow its service here.

IBISWorld says that
industry has grown 4.1 percent each of the last five years, to $12.2 billion
worldwide.

David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Virtual data rooms

There's DropBox and Box, the data storage
companies thought to be nearing IPOs, letting us store and transfer our data
using the cloud. And Evernote (with CEO Phil Libin pictured above), another fast-growing startup which
lets us collect and sort our own notes and insights, store in the cloud and
access from any of our devices. And there's corporate data room solutions like ShareFile
and AppFolio SecureDocs.

They're all in an industry that should grow to $728.4
million in 2013, a 16 percent increase in just a year.

Paolo Vescia/San Francisco Business Times

Travel agencies (online)

We're not talking the traditional agency storefronts in strip malls, but the online travel sites making it easier to research, map, review and book travel. The traditional players like Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz are now being challenged by startups like Jetsetter, which offers vacation planning, booking and flash sales on trips, and up-and-coming group trip planning sites like Gatherball and Jetaport.
IBISWorld predicts revenue growth of 6.1 percent this year, to $20.7 billion. Over the next five years, online travel sites will drive the growth.

Jetsetter

Translation services

The diversification
of the United States and the increasingly global business world are forcing
more of us to learn new languages or hire a translator. Translation services,
as a result, have grown as an industry to $3.2 billion, with 4 percent
annualized growth over the past five years.

Intriguing startups
in this space include Duolingo, which
provides language learning and translation (via the language learners) and
recently raised a $15 million round, Waygo,
which uses optical character recognition to read Chinese symbols (and recently
exited 500 Startups accelerator program), and TripLingo,
an app that provides the most useful and popular phrases so that travelers can
sound like locals.

Duolingo

IT security consulting

Former hacker Kevin
Mitnick (above) has launched a consulting business to help clients protect
themselves from people like him. The man served five
years in jail after he was convicted of bypassing the computer security
systems at Sun Microsystems, Motorola and the FBI. Now he's using that
knowledge for good, in the IT security industry. (He also wrote the book,
pictured above)

Mitnick joins
startups like Digitsec and Taasera in an industry that has grown 9.8
percent annually since 2009, to $5.3 billion.

Bloomberg

Digital forensic services

AccessData
Grouphelps retrieve information stored online or on
computers to help in criminal cases, HR investigations or other fraud
prevention. Digital Assembly is
helping forensics teams extract information from digital images online. Fourandsix Technologies can determine if
a social media image is real or fake.

According to
IBISWorld, there is no industry leader in this emerging category of business
called digital forensic services, leaving plenty more upside for an
industry that's grown 13.7 percent annually over the past five years to $878
million.